Press Release

For Web Release Only
September 28, 2022

For more information contact:
Traci Cook
Children's Forum Staff Director
Phone: (301) 458-4082
Email: cot6@cdc.gov

Release of America's Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2022
New special feature reports on selected key indicators of well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic

The America's Children 2022 Brief showcases selected COVID-19-related indicators to address the impact of this pandemic on child well-being. This brief report also provides an At-a-Glance summary table displaying the most recent data for all 41 regular America's Children indicators.

Indicators cover a range of topics, including the percentage of America's children who received the COVID-19 vaccine, the percentage of teens who reported that the pandemic had negatively affected their mental health, and how schools adapted to the pandemic.

By November 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the COVID-19 vaccine for all children ages 5–17 to protect against severe illness. In February 2022, approximately 45% of children ages 5–17 had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

In October–December 2020, almost 1 in 5 adolescents (18%) perceived that the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected their mental health "quite a bit or a lot," and an additional 51% perceived "a little or some" negative effect on their mental health.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, a higher percentage of public schools than of private schools (77% versus 73%) reported moving classes to online distance-learning formats.

Three of the nine special feature indicators in this brief rely on the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) as a data source.¹ The HPS was developed by the U.S. Census Bureau in collaboration with multiple federal agencies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This experimental tool, while designed to collect data quickly and efficiently from U.S. households to produce timely information on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the population, may not meet some of the Census Bureau's usual statistical quality standards. The survey asks respondents about educational, employment, health, housing, and food-related outcomes as well as other topics, and offers an important new way to monitor the impact of COVID-19 on America's families with children.

Other highlights from this year's report include:

• Child Food Insufficiency: Child food insufficiency (defined as households with children that reported that children in the household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the last 7 days) peaked at 17% in December 2020.
• Housing Instability: For renter households with children, most measures of finance-related housing instability reached their peak during late October 2020–mid-January 2021 and their lowest level during mid-April–late June 2021.
• Pandemic Health Care and Child Care: The percentage of households with any children who had a telehealth visit in the last 4 weeks decreased from 24% (mid- to late April 2021) to 17% (late January–early February 2022).
• Summer Enrichments Programs: During the summer of 2021, about 85% of public schools offered summer programs and 51% offered summer camps to their students to address pandemic-related learning needs.
• Child and Adolescent Mortality: In 2020, 141 children ages 0–17 died from COVID-19 (0.2 deaths per 100,000 population). In 2021, deaths from COVID-19 among children increased to 434 (0.6 deaths per 100,000 population).

This report is published by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics and is posted on www.childstats.gov.